How to Craft Meta Tags for SEO and CTR

You already know the importance of your page’s title and description tags for SEO. But you may not realize that these tags influence your page’s click through rate. In this video I’ll show you how to optimize your meta tags that will make Google rank your pages highly in their search results…and get users to click on them.

Video Transcript

Hey! What’s up everybody? It’s Brian Dean from Quicksprout, and In this video I’m going to show you how to craft your title and description tags to maximize your SEO value and click through rate. So let’s say the your trying to rank for the keyword cheep web hosting. Now obviously, the higher up you are in the organic results, the better your click rate is going to be. But that’s not all there is to it, because the copy that appears in your title tag and the description tag can make a massive difference in how many people click on your result.

So obviously, from an SEO standpoint, you want to put your keyword in the title tag, and preferably early on the title tag. Okay? So in WordPress, you’d put it at the title of your post. And then you also want to put it here, using your SEO plugin of choice, like Yost. So you’d put it here, and then you’d want to put your keyword once in the description. So that’s basically all there is to SEO in title tags, but the copy that you put around this keyword here and around the keyword in the description tag can make a huge difference in how many people click through.

So, your first step is to look at the ads that appear in google for your target keywords because these people that are advertising in Google have generally tested thousands of different variations of ads for maximizing click through rate. So basically all I have to do is take the elements that’s worked for them, and apply it to your particular page. For example, we have host gator here, and they have one cent web hosting scalable secure web hosting. Now they have probably tested several variations of this ad and found that this one works. So what I’d like to do is look at some specific ads that are somewhere above the fold in the google ads. So either here or one the sidebar, because those are generally preforming well in ad words. And then I like to look at just generally what tends to be most common. And what I noticed here is that numbers tend to be very common.

So specific numbers like one cent, one dollar, top 10, 2013, 99 cents, fifteen, those numbers tend to do well. So that’s something that you would want to apply into your post or whatever page that you’re trying to rank. You can also look at keywords that are similar. Okay? So you don’t necessarily have to emulate your specific keyword that you’re trying to rank for. You can emulate the ads from related keywords, and sometimes you can get some great ideas doing that. So obviously someone searching for best web hosting is similar to someone that’s searching for cheap web hosting. So you do the same thing, and look at the ads. As you can see there’s a lot of overlap here, and that numbers tend to appear in most of the ads.

Now, you can also look in Bing. So just head over to Bing, put in your target keyword, and as you can see the ads have the same thing. They all have numbers in them. So that’s definitely something that you’d want to incorporate into your tags. Okay? So based on this information alone, a lot of times, that’s more than enough to increase your click through rate more than you would probably if you just tried to write the ad without any advanced knowledge. So what you want to do is head back to your post, and under cheep web hosting you’d put something like, you know, top 10 hosts for 2013. And then in the description you’d put something like, you know, cheap web hosting starting at a dollar per month, right?

So that’s taking the information that you saw in the ads and incorporating it into your meta tags. Now, if you really want to drill deep into this, Okay? You want to take one of the results that’s ranking highly in ad words. So take top ten best cheap hosting, in this case. So copy it. And then head over to semrush.com. So semrush is a program that has a free and a paid option, but the free option can usually give you more than enough information for what we’re doing here, so.

Create an account, log in, and the paste the domain into this area here and click on search. And when you do that, it will give you all the ranking information for this keyword, both organic and paid. So because we’re looking for paid information, you want to head over to this advertising research area and click on ad text. And that’ll show you the ads that they are using across several different keywords in Google US. Okay? So as you can see, they use pretty much the same copy for all of their ads, which suggests that this has been highly tested and that this particular headline tends to work well. The top 10 cheap hosting 2013. Okay?

So that’s definitely some things that you might not want to copy exactly, but you want to incorporate those elements into your copy. Now, if you have, let’s say, a page that you really want to rank for, and that maybe each visitor is work five dollars or en dollars, you really want to get scientific about this. And to do that, you want to create a Google doc that keeps track of all the ads that you’ve found consistently throughout different keywords. So those are obviously proven winners.

So in this case of the cheap web hosting, we know that this headline tends to do really well because we’ve seen it across several different keywords in semrush. So you take the title and you just paste it into here, and then you paste the description. Okay? So what this does is allows you to see all the different ads in one place. And what you can do is scroll down, you know, as you populate this list with different ads, and you can see what elements tend to be most common and which ones you can apply for your posts.

Now, finally, you can actually use this for content that you already have published using Google webmaster tools. So let’s log into Google webmaster tools. Once you’re here, click on whatever site you’re interested in, and then click on search traffic, and then click on search queries. When you do that, it’ll show you different keywords that you’re ranking for and you’re click through rate. Okay? So this is important because you can find some, maybe, underperforming pages, and then improve their copy using this strategy.

So for example, let’s take the keyword backlength. So my click through rate is four percent. Click on that and it’ll show you which pages are appearing for that keyword. And obviously, this is the most common with fifty five hundred impressions, and my click through rate, you know, doesn’t, it doesn’t have the data here because it’s not enough. But you can see if you scroll down you can get more specific click through rate data across, you know, all the pages that are ranking for that keyword.

So in the case where I appear at number five, my click through is 11 percent, and six-to-ten is four percent. So that’s actually pretty good, but, you know, if I wanted to improve it what I would do is go back to Google, right? And I would put in the keyword backlengths. And I would see what ads were ranking and repeat that process. Okay? So, you know, hire backlength builders, rated number one SEO tool, free backlengths, these are, are potential titles that I would incorporate into my title tag. Okay?

To potentially improve the click through rate. So if you go to webmaster tools, and you go to search queries, and you see some like, one percent or two percent under your click through rate, that’s definitely somewhere where you might want to use this strategy to increase your click through rate while maintaining the same SEO value that you already have. So that’s it for maximizing click through rate and SEO with your title tags and description tags. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next video.